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Jane Austen taught Monica Ali that money is always an issue – even for those who have it.
Photograph: Allstar/BBC

From Jane Austen to haunting memoirs: books to open your eyes to inequality

In the second part of our series, we asked Sarah Perry, Jeffrey Sachs, Sebastian Barry, Monica Ali, Richard Wilkinson, Julian Baggini, Kate Pickett and Afua Hirsch to tell us which titles helped shape their views on inequality

Sarah Perry

One Christmas my mother gave me Helen Forrester’s memoir Twopence to Cross the Mersey. What timing! I was warm, overfed on mince pies and wearing a new jumper, and had no idea these things made me rich. I suppose I had a child’s sense that some people were very poor, but thought it rare, and it never occurred to me that structural inequalities, unchecked capitalism, and foolish or malicious government policies could topple anyone at any time from comfort to penury.

Forrester was born in 1919 to socialites who built a glittering life on the tick. Then her father went bankrupt in the Great Depression, leaving his family of seven children with only the clothes they stood up in. They decamped to Liverpool, across the Mersey from Forrester’s grandmother, but could never summon up twopence for the ferry. The book is a calm, sad account of a childhood of bitter cold and near-starvation. Her mother numbed her misery with aspirin; her father sought out parish handouts. They lived in a single room. Forrester left school to care for the children, waking at dawn to creep along the street skimming half an inch from the milk bottles on the doorsteps, so that her baby brother would survive.

I never forgot it. It comes to mind when I see the remains of Grenfell Tower, or read about food banks, or people dying with empty cupboards and half-completed government paperwork on the table. It made me realise that poverty isn’t a natural law, nor is it symptomatic of lack of moral fibre. It is a monstrous and an avoidable evil and, so long as society harbours vast inequality, it will always be lying in wait.

Jeffrey Sachs

I read The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) by John Maynard Keynes well over 30 years ago and it powerfully stuck with me. This is not a book about inequality per se, but is a book about self-inflicted stupidity. The hard peace after World War I sowed the seeds of the disasters that soon followed: fascism, the Great Depression, Hitler, the second world war. Keynes’s message is essentially that societal wellbeing is fragile and that we are all in it together. Grabbing too much leads to untoward and unaccountable ills; acting for the common good builds a basis for prosperity. So true for our time.

Keynes’s message is essentially that societal wellbeing is fragile and that we are all in it together.

Jeffery Sachs

We in America are in the hands of a plutocracy, driven by insatiable greed, and now capped by a sociopathic president whose malignant narcissism could be the end of us all. Yet the greedy believe that they can use Trump to do their bidding, for example in order to grab a new round of unaffordable and undeserved tax cuts for the rich. Unless we are able to reestablish a sense of fairness and the common good, this latest episode of extreme greed and rising inequality will end badly, once again. Listen to the Keynes of 1919, and take care of the common future before it’s too late.

Sebastian Barry

Always having due regard to the famous strictures of Chinua Achebe, nevertheless Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which I read when I was maybe 17, made me question many things. Not least the casual racism of my own grandfather, who had been an engineering officer in the British Foreign Service as late as the 1920s. The scene that burns into the memory ineradicably is the notorious “grove of death”, where exhausted workers are propped against trees to die, having been drained by empire not only of their dignity but their very life-force. This image of terminal eschatology seems to echo and repeat through many other readings, not least in Native American history, and even in accounts of desolate figures during the Irish famine (ironically of course for my grandfather). Heart of Darkness alerts the human heart to its own dreadful tendency towards heartlessness.

Monica Ali

I’m mixed race and grew up poor, on a council estate in Bolton in the 1970s. I’m not sure that I ever had my eyes closed to inequality and injustice. I didn’t need a book to open them. I could just look around. But in my teens when I started reading Zola (I think my first was Germinal), it was a revelation to me that poverty and inequality could be the subject of fiction. Then I discovered George Orwell, including The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London. I was reading Jane Austen then as well, and switching back and forth between ballroom scenes and back-alley scenes. Austen taught me that money is always an issue, even for those who have it – because others have more, because they might lose what they have, or because love of money poisons something else in their lives.

Richard Wilkinson

Though I have never studied anthropology formally, I have always wanted to know how differently human societies can work. Are they just rich or poorer, or can people live in totally different ways? Are people driven by the same concerns everywhere, or do they have very different ideas about what life is about?

Despite starting off as a student of economic history, I spent a lot of time with anthropologists and became increasingly interested in hunting and gathering societies. I was particularly influenced first by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore’s Man the Hunter (1968) and then more particularly by Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics (1972). For those of us who had assumed that preindustrial people had always lived short lives in perpetual toil and dire poverty, the view they suggested of our prehistoric past was eye-opening.

Peter Singer's argument does make me acutely aware of the injustice of economic equality and deeply uncomfortable that I am a beneficiary of it

Juilan Baggini

Hunters and gatherers were apparently not living with perpetual scarcity; instead they needed to spend rather little time in food collection and often had a great deal of leisure. Because their needs were few, they were dubbed by these authors as “the original affluent societies”. More intriguing still, was the egalitarian nature of these societies, their reliance on food sharing and gift exchange, and their tendency to proscribe overtly self-interested forms of exchange.

I also feel very indebted to Christopher Boehm for taking this work forward in his book Moral Origins: the Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame (2012) which explains the prehistoric roots of the human concern for equality which runs parallel to our much more widely recognised desire for status and preeminence. In this and his earlier work, Boehm shows how the desire for dominance was held in check to maintain the egalitarianism of these early forms of society.

Julian Baggini

Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics issues a very strong challenge that is hard to meet. He argues that all the while that some live in absolute poverty, it is unjust to retain more wealth than you need to live in reasonable comfort, and by that he doesn’t mean enough for the odd meal out or a flat white.

His utilitarian morality requires us to consider the interests of everyone with complete impartiality, adopting an almost god-like, detached viewpoint. Most of us, however, believe we have more responsibilities towards some than others, most obviously to family. If that’s true, making huge sacrifices for strangers is laudable but not obligatory.

I think there is something right in these objections. Still, his argument does make me acutely aware of the injustice of economic equality and deeply uncomfortable that I am a beneficiary of it. It is a reminder that when we continue to take advantage of our good fortune it is a choice and that we could, and should, be prepared to share our wealth much more than we do.

Kate Pickett

I was a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996 when Richard Wilkinson’s Unhealthy Societies was published. I was studying epidemiology and felt I had finally found a discipline and set of methods that met my political as well as my academic leanings. Social epidemiology shows us how important social structures and relationships are for human health and wellbeing; population health is a canary in the coalmine that can alert us to destructive political and social policy choices.

Unhealthy Societies didn’t just open my eyes to the impact of inequality, it showed me how research can be used to have an impact of its own

Kate Pickett

All of us students knew about Richard’s research, described by the British Medical Journal as the “Big Idea”, showing how income inequality damages population health. Unhealthy Societies brought the statistics to life – typical of Richard’s writing it told compelling stories to frame the epidemiological analysis. We learned how a small town in the US, populated by Italian immigrants, gave clues to the importance of social solidarity for the prevention of heart disease. How health in post-war Japan was transformed by economic equality; how baboons in the Serengeti demonstrate the impact of chronic stress on immune function and the central role of disrespect in triggering violence. The book was so popular that no sooner had you checked it out of the library someone else would request it and it had to be returned.

It was years before I met Richard professionally, and before we started to work together. I once tried to see him speak at a conference but couldn’t even get near the room; the corridor was packed with people trying to hear him. But even before we met, Unhealthy Societies was influencing my own research programme and shaping the questions I chose to study. Now, Richard and I work together, thinking through ideas, analysing, synthesising and interpreting data, finding the stories that will bring the research alive – campaigning for a more equal world is our joint and all-consuming project. Unhealthy Societies didn’t just open my eyes to the impact of inequality, it showed me how research can be used to have an impact of its own.

Afua Hirsch

One of my most striking childhood memories is watching the telly with my parents, aged eight, the faces of four black women starkly lit, lined up in profile, singing the intro to the Specials song Free Nelson Mandela. I asked my parents, my mother weeping freely as we watched a concert marking the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, what the fuss was about. Their response was the first time I had an inkling that there was widespread racial injustice in the world.

Five years after that, my mother bought me a copy of Cry, the Beloved Country. I had no inkling as to its content – and nothing about the innocuous cover of my little paperback, or the oh-so-familiar, English sound of the author Alan Paton’s name, could have prepared me for such a powerfully beautiful lyric, a long song that tells of the deep inhumanity of apartheid. It touched me both in substance and style.

The book is written in prose of biblical simplicity. I had never read anything like it. The spareness of the language only serves to augment the devastating impact of its narrative – a pastor from Natal, Stephen Kumalo, searches for his son, Absalom, in the urban chaos of Johannesburg, in a country riven by the brutality of racial prejudice and the decay and destruction of poverty.

Cry, the Beloved Country woke me up to the reality of the crushing injustice that existed in South Africa. But it was also a lesson in inequality and prejudice everywhere. A lesson I never forgot.

• This article was amended on 4 December 2017 because an earlier version referred to “mince peas”. This has been corrected to say mince pies.